Abstract
Televised political campaign advertising remains the most influential means for candidates to communicate with the public. One of the most closely watched political races in the United States played out on TV during the fall of 2006, matching Missouri senatorial candidates who held widely diverse ideologies yet championed very similar issues that were hot button topics nationwide. We applied symbolic convergence theory with its critical method, fantasy theme analysis (FTA), because of its facility to explore and understand meaning constructed through the convergence and competition of alternate symbolic worlds. Through this method, not previously used as a means of tracking the rhetorical visions of competing political campaign TV spots, we explain the master analogue that underpins the advertising rhetoric and offer insights into how candidates and voters make policy choices and the rationales they use to defend them. We illustrate that both the verbal and the visual narratives depict the vastly diverse rhetorical visions of the candidates and, by extension, their supporters based on opposing views of morality associated with Republican and Democratic worldviews. This study extends the reach of FTA in studying the visual signs and symbols of political advertising.
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